20/20 Vision, Second Edition

The Art of Contemporary University Printmaking

Kristin Casaletto

I grew up surrounded by my father’s artwork, which he makes and has always made prolifically and compulsively—drawing literally on everything at hand, including furniture, food, clothes, and his children. I took this for granted. I thought making art was integral to daily life for everyone, especially since my father was not an artist by profession. (He was a philosophy professor, publisher, and other things, and is self-taught—though far from “naïve”—as an artist.) So as a professional man, he was not officially an artist. He was simply an artist by virtue of his continuous output, by living in a state of sustained creativity; an artist by example. I never thought about the word “artist” as a title, goal, or profession, and I don’t think we ever talked about such things as I grew up. I, myself, had no conscious intention of becoming an artist. I thought generating images was simply a given, a part of normal existence. Only as a near-grown-up did I discover this not to be so for everyone. I did not realize “art” could be a “day job” until much later.

Much later has intervened. I am now a professor of art and an artist. I’ve traveled to see much of the world’s best art in situ, and I spend a lot of time trying to teach and make art. And I’ve noticed, in the last several years, when I visit my parents, that I have become interested anew in my father’s artwork. I no longer take it for granted, and I now look at it from a much broader and more objective vantage point than I did as a kid. And it holds up. I wanted to have a show together, and to name it Generation, a reference not just to our family tie and age relationship, but to generation as creation, growth, and life. So Generation, the first exhibit we’ve ever had together, has become a means for me to examine my father’s work carefully, as well as my own work, the relationship our work may have, and my father’s influence on me not just as family, but as an artist. He says I don’t influence him as an artist (I don’t think that’s completely true, even if he does), but he clearly has greatly influenced my work, perhaps most fundamentally by imparting the notion that art is a means of thinking, an in-road to philosophy and to spirituality, to wonder, meaning, and to dreaming all things.